Supernumiphone

I'd like to see exclusive powers in Energy Blast, like how Night Widows can take Aim or Follow Up, but not both. So when you pick a power from Energy Blast you can choose the KB version or the KD version, but you can't take both. I would finally be able to run an Energy Blast toon.

I'd do one build for teaming with KD powers, and a KB build for solo.

Looks pretty solid to me. I think you might have endurance problems during protracted fights that have you using your AoEs a lot, but there are ways to manage that. If you can afford a Golgi for Dark Regen you can push your endurance reduction to the ED cap.

The other thing you might want to consider is taking and slotting Cloak of Fear instead of Oppressive Gloom. You can squeeze 2 damage procs into the power while still getting decent values on the other important attributes. It won't knock your socks off but it's a decent extra source of a little AoE if you want it. I slot 1 Endoplasm, 1 Lysosome, 1 Enzyme, a Glimpse of the Abyss Acc/End, GotA proc, and Cloud Senses proc.

Obviously doing that would require pulling slots from elsewhere, and that would be up to you if you think it's worthwhile. I tend to skimp a bit on Energy/Negative defense which gives me a little more freedom.

Purple names are cool.

I think Regen is overdue for some debuff resistance. It's much more reliant on clicks than FA, so IMO it should have more -recharge resistance than FA got, but I'll take whatever I can get. 20% debuff resistance won't do much in the face of some of the massive debuffs that get thrown around, but I'm sure there are at least some edge cases where it could make the difference between surviving and not.

Ditto for -regen resistance. Having regen so easily completely floored on a set named after the effect seems wrong to me. However I don't know that there's a number that could give meaningful protection without being too much. The -regen effects out there seem to be made so strong as to be guaranteed to overpower anything. It's like facing the riders in the LGTF or AV Positron. Once they hit you, your recharge is gone, no matter what. None of your powers are recharging until the power effect wears off, regardless of your -recharge resistance because the effects are just that strong. Fortunately -recharge effects of that magnitude are rare. The same is not true for -regen however.

The self rez needs a period of untouchability. If you take Resilience, which negates the stun from an Awaken inspiration, there is literally no benefit to using Revive over an Awaken. I can e-mail myself a few Awakens and have no reason whatsoever to take that power. My preference would be for that to be the only change however. I'm not a fan of rezzes that offer a buff followed by a debuff. They seem to be designed with the presumption that they will be used to recover from a bad situation, followed by stopping to catch your breath. In practice the team is moving on to the next set of mobs while I'm debuffed. That's why the Rad ally rez is my least favorite in the game. I get back in the action, then a minute later I'm wondering why I keep missing. I look at my tohit and realize it's the debuff from the rez. Then I go make a sandwich or something while I wait for it to wear off.

It should work for you and anyone viewing you unless you have some non-standard settings. You should no longer be able to see your player model anymore. If you can, something's going on.

DDR is independent from defense buffs. It will reduce debuffs by a fixed amount regardless of how much defense you have.

I've run quite a few with random people in the D. Most have been successful. I'm surprised you're having so many problems. I thought most people had it figured out by now. Keep at it, you'll get it.

I try to use Seeds from behind a group when I'm concerned about return fire. Stealth suppresses the instant you begin to activate the power, while the confuse doesn't take effect until a second or two later. If you're behind the mobs you're less likely to be detected while activating Seeds. Another benefit is that sometimes mobs seem to take a second to turn around when they notice you, so with a little luck by the time they do the confuse will be in effect.

I noticed a large reduction in the damage I would take when I started doing that. It's not a 100% surefire way to eliminate return fire but it does help quite a bit.

I walk up to Bane Spider Scouts and AS them all the time. They don't see me.

Sharkhead seems to get hit with this somewhat regularly. I have no idea why that zone is prone to it and not others. It's actually been a while since I've seen it. It often takes hours or days to get fixed. I'd like to know who to contact when it happens to get it looked at more quickly.

I built for regen, +HPs, and recharge on my Stone/Elec Brute. Building for defense would probably provide greater survivability across a broader range of situations, but I was sick of building all my toons for defense and wanted something different.

It does feel squishy in certain situations, but I'm still able to tank for full teams fairly easily. It would probably be easier to do so if I leaned on Fault more, but unless I'm really in a lot of trouble, which rarely happens, I don't use Fault. Most of the time I forget it's there. So just the resitances, regen, and near-perma Energize are enough for most situations, though I'm not hesitant to make good use of my inspiration tray based on my assessment of the situation I'm about to put myself in.

So that's a sort of long-winded way of saying go for it if you want to. I'm not so sure that going for S/L defense instead of a broader range is necessarily the way to go either. With 18% defense to all, one small luck puts you at 40% defense, which unless you're solo tanking for a full team on +4 while the rest of your team is somewhere else, will provide plenty of survivability. If you do need more, one medium luck will put you over the softcap. IMO 18% is also a nice base that accepts outside buffs really well.

Sure against a lot of enemies S/L defense is adequate. But there are those where it is not also, and we're seeing more of them in higher level content. You may have 90% resistance to Praetorian Clockwork energy damage, but they throw enough -recharge to completely shut you down, and no /Elec is not immune to the ridiculous amounts of it they put out.

The build you proposed will be weaker in some situations than a pure S/L build, but stronger in others. Arguably more of the former than the latter, but it's up to you to decide what you're looking to get out of your build. The bottom line is that IMO it's not a poor choice to make. I say go for it and see for yourself if it performs at a level that you feel is adequate.

On a Scrapper? No.

He despawned.

Regen is a little sub-par on Stalkers due to their low HP cap. That's no reason not to play and enjoy it though. The biggest change I would make is to remove the focus on adding +regen and +HP through IO set bonuses. Regen already has enough regen. If the sets tools aren't enough to save you, adding more regen won't either.

To put it another way, when you get defeated, more often than not it will be because you took too much damage all at once, and no amount of regen would have saved you. You have plenty of regen, and adding more gets you diminishing returns basically. What regen needs on a Stalker is to get hit less and/or to take less damage from the hits that get through. So defense and resistance.

Building for recharge is a great idea too of course. Getting all the click powers back faster makes a big difference in your survivability. So ideally you'd want all three. Recharge, defense, and resistance.

Taking Tough and Weave as you have is a great start, but from there you don't build on the defense nearly enough IMO. I'd want to have 25% at a minimum versus the main attack vectors/damage types I'd expect to face. Ideally I wouldn't stop until I hit 33% or so, enough to soft-cap with a small purple inspiration.

I'd drop the sets of Numinas and replace them with Doctored Wounds. That will push you up against the rule of 5 for 5% recharge bonuses real quick, so you can then drop the Crushing Impacts out of your attacks and replace them with a set that grants a defense bonus. Which one is up to you depending on your budget and whether you want typed or positional defense.

I'd also fit in Burst. It's not the best AoE but I like to have whatever I can get, and with a 100% crit from Hide, it's not bad and worth the pick and slots IMO. That's personal preference though.

Overall the build looks good to me. I think trading out some regen and +HPs for more defense will make a dramatic difference in your survivability though.

Edit: I would have offered a modified build for your consideration but I don't generally like mangling other people's builds without knowing a bit more about their build constraints.

The problem with Fury notifying mobs is the reason I try to fit Invisibility into my Brute builds when I can.

I would try deleting the file that stores the order of characters on the character select screen. That file seems to be able to cause all sorts of problems for people when it gets corrupted. It might be causing that character to not show up somehow.

Edit: The file in question is [CoH install directory]\[Account name]\playerslot.txt

So if my account name was Supernumiphone, and CoH was installed in the default directory on Windows XP, the file would be C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\Supernumiphone\playerslot.txt

Deleting the file doesn't harm your game install in any way. It will reset the order of your characters on your select screen to their default though, so you'll have to drag them around to re-order them to how you like them. If you just want to test if that is the problem, you could always rename the file instead of deleting it. Then once you've confirmed or denied that it is the cause of the problem, you could put it back if you wanted.

I get Field Crafter on all my toons eventually. For me it's a long-term goal though. It's part of the leveling process. I put up bids on recipes and salvage, go play, craft and list the resulting IOs, log off. In the course of leveling to 50 I usually have all the memorization badges and 600-700 of the required crafts. Then I just have to grind out the last few hundred crafts.

I realize most people aren't as patient as me and want to take a faster approach.

I'd like to know how you survived long enough to take that much damage. I call h4x.

If I was building a Dark/Kin I'd probably go for recharge and defense. I like Tactics on my Kins, so I'd get that. I'd also get Maneuvers. It doesn't provide a huge defense boost, but along with your -tohit debuffing it would help provide a bit more safety for your team.

I'd build for a decent amount of defense. I'm not a fan of sacrificing personal survivability, even on team-oriented builds. It seems to me that my Kins get a fair amount of aggro, especially when I'm rushing in to get off a full Fulcrum Shift before AoEs paste all the minions. A dead Kin isn't good for anything but Vengeance (and possibly Fallout.)

After that I'd go for recharge. With enough of it you can almost chain your two cones non-stop. That provides some nice AoE damage and decent debuffing too. It also means more of all the usual Kin goodness of course.

Although you could make an argument for slotting some attacks for -tohit rather than +damage on a Kin, I'm not a fan of that approach. Partially because I always build my toons for a minimum amount of solo capability, even if I don't solo them all that often. Also you can't always get a good Fulcrum Shift when you want it, and I wouldn't want to be completely reliant on FS for my damage.

Beyond that other power picks are largely dependent on personal preference. I don't think I'd take Power Mastery if I was building a Dark/Kin, but then there's not much a Kin needs that epics can provide anyway, so any choice can work really.

It's a 6-slot or skip power IMO. It has abysmal base accuracy, so you have to slot it to the ED cap for accuracy, or as close as you can get it. If you don't it could end up messing with the streakbreaker, which may or may not be an issue for you. Then again you have a damage aura too so it may not matter.

It also has a high endurance cost and two main enhanceable aspects, though you could easily choose to ignore one and focus on the other. If you really want to get by on as few slots as possible HOs are the way to go IMO.

I saw a video someone made showing the difference between a mob's regular attack rate versus when under the fear effect. I doubt I could find it now, but the difference was very noticeable. Yes mobs can attack back when you break the fear, but only once every so often so it will slow down the rate of incoming fire, albeit from minions only.

As for the tohit debuff, I'm becoming less and less of a fan of those as time goes on, aside from ATs that have access to really huge numbers on those debuffs. The current dev trend seems to be having us face a lot of +3s and +4s, which reduces the effectiveness of the small debuff in CoF to insignificance.